Most people can relate to the experience of having a colleague inexplicably treat them rudely at work. You’re not invited to attend a meeting. A co-worker gets coffee – for everyone but you. Your input is laughed at or ignored. You wonder: where did this come from? Did I do something? Why would he treat me that way? It can be very distressing because it comes out of nowhere and often we just don’t understand why it happened.

A large and growing body of research suggests that such incidents, termed workplace incivility or workplace rudeness, are not only very common, but also very harmful. Workplace rudeness is not limited to one industry, but has been observed in a wide variety of settings in a variety of countries with different cultures. Defined as low-intensity deviant behaviour with ambiguous intent to harm, these behaviours – small insults, ignoring someone, taking credit for someone’s work, or excluding someone from office camaraderie – seem to be everywhere in the workplace. The problem is that, despite their ‘low-intensity’ nature, the negative outcomes associated with workplace rudeness are anything but small or trivial.

It would be easy to believe that rudeness is ‘no big deal’ and that people must just ‘get over it’, but more and more researchers are finding that this is simply not true. Experiencing rudeness at work has been associated with decreased performance, decreased creativity, and increased turnover intentions, to name just a few of the many negative outcomes of these behaviours. In certain settings, these negative outcomes can be catastrophic – for example, a recent article showed that when medical teams experienced even minor insults before performing a procedure on a baby, the rudeness decimated their performance and led to mortality (in a simulation). Knowing how harmful these behaviours can be, the question becomes: where do they come from, and why do people do them?

While there are likely many reasons people behave rudely, at least one explanation that my colleagues and I have recently explored is that rudeness seems to be ‘contagious’. That is, experiencing rudeness actually causes people to behave more rudely themselves. Lots of things can be contagious – from the common cold, to smiling, yawning and other simple motor actions, to emotions (being around a happy person typically makes you feel happy). And as it turns out, being around a rude person can actually make you rude. But how?

There are two ways in which behaviours and emotions can be contagious. One is through a conscious process of social learning. For example, if you’ve recently taken a job at a new office and you notice that everybody carries a water bottle around, it likely won’t be long until you find yourself carrying one, too. This type of contagion is typically conscious. If somebody said: ‘Why are you carrying that water bottle around?’, you would say: ‘Because I saw everybody else doing it and it seemed like a good idea.’

Another pathway to contagion is unconscious: research shows that when you see another person smiling, or tapping a pencil, for example, most people will mimic those simple motor behaviours and smile or tap a pencil themselves. If someone were to ask why you’re smiling or tapping your pencil, you’d likely answer: ‘I have no idea.’

In a series of studies, my colleagues and I found evidence that rudeness can become contagious through a non-conscious, automatic pathway. When you experience rudeness, the part of your brain responsible for processing rudeness ‘wakes up’ a little bit, and you become a little more sensitive to rudeness. This means that you’re likely to notice more rude cues in your environment, and also to interpret ambiguous interactions as rude. For example, if someone said: ‘Hey, nice shoes!’ you might normally interpret that as a compliment. If you’ve recently experienced rudeness, you’re more likely to think that person is insulting you. That is, you ‘see’ more rudeness around you, or at least you think you do. And because you think others are being rude, you become more likely to behave rudely yourself.

You might be wondering, how long does this last? Without more research it’s impossible to say for sure, but in one of our studies we saw that experiencing rudeness caused rude behaviour up to seven days later. In this study, which took place in a negotiations course at a university, participants engaged in negotiations with different partners. We found that when participants negotiated with a rude partner, in their next negotiation their partner thought they behaved rudely. In this study, some of the negotiations took place with no time lag, sometimes there was a three-day time lag, and sometimes there was a seven-day time lag. To our surprise, we found that the time lag seemed to be unimportant, and at least within a seven-day window the effect did not appear to be wearing off.

Unfortunately, because the rudeness is contagious and unconscious, it’s hard to stop. So what can be done? Our work points to a need to re-examine the types of behaviours that are tolerated at work. More severe deviant behaviours, such as abuse, aggression and violence, are not tolerated because their consequences are blatant. While rudeness of a more minor nature makes its consequences a little harder to observe, it is no less real and no less harmful, and thus it might be time to question whether we should tolerate these behaviours at work.

You might be thinking that it will be impossible to end workplace rudeness. But work cultures can change. Workers once used to smoke at their desks, and those same workers would have said it was a natural part of office life that couldn’t be removed. Yet workplace smoking is verboten everywhere now. We’ve drawn the line at smoking and discrimination – and rudeness should be the next to go.

Trevor Foulk

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

As best we could tell, Secretary Tillerson first talked about the redesign at his agency as an “employee-led” effort on August 9, 2017 at a quick stop at the U.S. Embassy in Malaysia:

We’ve taken that information now and we’ve set up a number of work teams. Now this whole effort is led by the employees of the State Department, your colleagues. We have a steering team that helps guide them that’s chaired by Deputy Secretary Sullivan. But we really are wanting this to be an employee-led redesign effort, and it’s all about looking at how we get our work done.

But back in July, an unnamed State Department spokesperson appeared on the July 17, 2017 Foreign Policy piece Tillerson to Shutter State Department War Crimes Office, talking about the “employee-led redesign initiative.”

When asked why Ms. Beams left her post, Official Spokesperson Heather Nauert said “She said to me that she came here to set the vision for the redesign.” Further Ms. Nauert said, “She sets the vision. She’s done that for this organization. She feels that she’s accomplished that in setting the vision. She said to me, quote, “I feel good about it.”

A member of the press corps was quick to ask a fairly simple follow-up question – “in a sentence, what is the vision that she has set for the redesign?” The official response is a pretzels demo:

“Well, one of the things that we’ve said is that this is an employee-driven process. And a lot of folks made fun of this, but asking employees what they want, what changes they want, is something that is new and something that is significant, and that is something that they have been able to do to determine where there are redundancies. And that’s one of the ways that we will do that.”

Is Ms. Nauert suggesting that the “employee-driven” or employee-led” process was Ms. Beams’ vision for the redesign? And if so, how was Ms. Beams able to do this when a month before she joined the State Department, an unnamed spokesperson was already talking about the redesign in those same terms?

If the spox was not suggesting that the “employee-driven process” was Ms. Beams’ vision at the State Department, what the heck was she talking about. What was the vision-setting that Ms. Beams accomplished at the agency during her three-month tenure?

Excerpt from the transcript:

QUESTION: Why did Maliz Beams leave her post as counselor of the department?

MS NAUERT: So Maliz Beams was brought in to help pull together the redesign. That’s one of the things that the Secretary said is important to him and important to the State Department. And frankly, when you ask people here, the rank and file, what they think about the redesign, while our communications have not been fantastic – I will admit that – the – they support by and large the efforts of the redesign, acknowledging that the State Department can become more efficient and operate more effectively with the redesign.

Maliz Beams – I spoke with her earlier today at length. I was there yesterday when she announced to senior staff that she would be leaving the State Department. Maliz made the decision to resign from the State Department. She said to me that she came here to set the vision for the redesign. She has done this for many companies. She’s had a 30-year career in this line of work. She sets the vision. She’s done that for this organization. She feels that she’s accomplished that in setting the vision. She said to me, quote, “I feel good about it.” So now is the time when she decided that she wanted to step back and that it was the time for the State Department to be able to pick it up from here.

We are in phase three of the redesign right now. There are 70 initiatives that she helped enable to prepare to launch. Those initiatives are being chaired by some of our top career people who have been here for many, many years, included among them names and faces you will know: Ambassador Bill Todd, also Ambassador Marcia Bernicat from Bangladesh. They are involved in these 70 initiatives. They are people that the building knows, they are people that the building trust, they are people who love this institution. I can tell you that the Secretary is expected to speak with staff here at the State Department sometime in the near future. I don’t have a date for that just yet. And then we have our new under secretary for public diplomacy and political affairs, who will be handling some of the communications going forward.

QUESTION: She was not asked or encouraged to leave?

MS NAUERT: She made the decision to step down.

QUESTION: No, no. She couldn’t make the decision to step down after having been encouraged to consider whether to step down?

MS NAUERT: She made the decision to step down.

QUESTION: But was not encouraged or asked to step down?

MS NAUERT: Not to my knowledge. I was not in the meeting at the time, but I spoke with her. I also spoke with our deputy secretary and others about this, and this was her decision.

QUESTION: Heather, in a sentence, what is the vision that she has set for the redesign?

MS NAUERT: Well, one of the things that we’ve said is that this is an employee-driven process. And a lot of folks made fun of this, but asking employees what they want, what changes they want, is something that is new and something that is significant, and that is something that they have been able to do to determine where there are redundancies. And that’s one of the ways that we will do that. Among the other things in the redesign that has been highlighted as important to this department and it may seem kind of dopey to a lot of folks who have great computers and comms like you all do, but to get a better computer system in place. I cannot stress —

QUESTION: A better commuter system?

MS NAUERT: Computer system.

QUESTION: Oh, oh, oh. Because I was going to go all in on the better commuter system. (Laughter.) The Metro is awful.

MS NAUERT: It is extremely frustrating when you are trying to respond to press questions, for example. How many times have you all heard from me or from Robert or Robert’s predecessor, Mark Stroh, when our comms are down for a very long time? It is embarrassing. We can’t get to you, you can’t get to us. Well, imagine if we need to reach folks around the world. So that has been a problem. And that’s one of the things that the Secretary and Maliz Beams has identified as being something that we want to make more efficient and better. Okay.